by Guy Page
On January 21, 2024, VDC reporter Paul Bean called me in the late afternoon with the stunning news that a Border Patrol guard had been shot and mortally killed in an encounter in the Northeast Kingdom. In the coming weeks and days, research by Bean, me and Mike Donoghue, and reports by investigative journalist Andy Ngo revealed that at least one of the shooters was a German national, a transgender, and a follower of a San Francisco-based cult already implicated in the murder of several people. The cult, named Ziz after the assumed name of founder and leader Jack LaSota, was dominated by math and computer geniuses espousing an anarchist, anti-capitalist philosophy and fear of an AI singularity that would rule the world.
Ziz took root amid the modern Effective Altruism rationalist movement that sprung up in Berkeley, California about 15 years ago. Its rejects religion and traditional philosophy as outmoded ways of solving the world’s problems and instead espoused rational thinking expressed in mathematical algorithms.
If all that sounds dense and confusing…. that’s because it is, especially to us muggles not as gifted as the Harry Potter obsessed adherents in the mostly online movement.
And as so often happens in daily journalism, the story in VDC eventually petered out, with a few stories by Mike Donoghue about the prosecution of the surviving shooter, Theresa Youngblut.
But Andy Ngo kept following the story. In his recently released book, “The Zizians: Inside a Trans Death Cult”, he profiles the beginnings of Ziz (LaSota was likely abused by his father, who was sexually abused by his own father), his decision to assume a new identity based on a demonic spider in a video game, and his eventually successful recruitment of devoted followers implicated in killings in several states.
Ngo is a high-profile investigative journalist known for his fearless reporting on Antifa. He is known to longtime Chronicle readers for having a 2022 scheduled Dartmouth College speech canceled after an Antifa leader offered cash to anyone who could assault journalist Andy Ngo at the speech. In the face of threats, Ngo’s talk was held online at the request of college authorities.
I’m 30 pages into my reading of my advanced copy of The Zizians and my mind is being blown by what I’m learning about the ultra-intellectual, amoral teaching and practices of Ziz, about how Bernie Sanders was influenced in his AI doom predictions by an Effective Altruist leader, and how the San Francisco area housing crisis contributed significantly to LaSota’s radical anarchy.
I haven’t even gotten to the part about the shooting of Maland and the arrest of two Ziz women in Vermont. Tune in to Chronicle Conversations Monday, October 19 at 12:30 on WVMT AM 620, FM 101.3, and wvmtradio.com for our live interview with Andy Ngo.
The following is excerpted from an Amazon review of Ngo’s newest book:
As a New York Times bestselling author and one of the world’s foremost investigative reporters on Antifa and left-wing extremism, Andy Ngo has spent years tracking the rise of violent ideologies that much of the mainstream media has been unwilling to confront. Now, he turns his focus to an even more elusive, mysterious, and dangerous threat: the secretive cult of the Zizians, a transgender, leftist “rationalist” group of AI doomers linked to eight violent deaths, including the killings of a U.S. Border Patrol agent and a key murder trial witness.
With exclusive access to firsthand witnesses and family members, and drawing on court records and deep-dive reporting, Ngo unravels the chilling story of how a fringe online movement metastasized into a real-world, international violent death cult. Through meticulous research and on-the-ground reporting, he exposes the cult’s ideology, recruitment tactics, and its ties to broader radical leftist movements. As authorities scramble to track down fugitive members, Ngo reconstructs the cult’s deadly trail from alleged assassinations to execution-style killings, and examines how its leader, computer science “genius” Jack LaSota, known as “Ziz,” became an enigmatic, Charles Manson-esque figure who came to exert a fatal grip over his followers.
This book is not just an exposé―it is a warning. As gender extremism and militant ideologies continue to radicalize and spread, the risk of similar movements and groups emerging grows. With law enforcement hamstrung by political pressure and mainstream media reluctant to investigate, Ngo stands apart in sounding the alarm. His fearless reporting has already reshaped the national conversation on Antifa. Now, he delivers the definitive account of one of the most shocking and under-reported crime stories of the decade.